Ron Crumpton:
Increase SNAP & unemployment benefits by 25%

If it had not been for food stamps and unemployment benefits, 4.4 million Americans would have fell into poverty during the Great Recession. Of that 4.4 million, 1.6 million would have been children.

We need to increase the benefit of the SNAP program
and the unemployment benefit by 25%. The current benefits are just not realistic. With current SNAP benefits, the average beneficiary receives about $5 per day, which is not enough for a healthy diet.
The cost of these changes would require an increase in funding of $43.5 billion, but it is something that we must do.

Without these changes, the programs will not be able to meet the needs of the American people. As stated earlier, this does not just
benefit the poor, more than 70% of Americans will use these programs at some point in their lives. It is important that when Americans need these programs, these programs meet the needs of Americans.

Ron Crumpton:
Stop fighting war on people in poverty: Fight poverty!

Poverty should be one of the top concerns for any elected leader, it has a negative effect on almost everything we as society entrust our government to do, but it seems that those in the
Republican Party find it is more politically viable to fight a war on the people in poverty than it is to fight a war to end poverty in this country.

Study after study shows that states that have a high poverty rate also have lower test scores in education, while having higher rates of drug use and crime.
Unfortunately, this is one of the many issues that the Republican Party refuses to address; instead, they support policies that conflict and make the problem worse.

Robert Bentley:
We are poorest state, but government just causes dependency

The poorest county in the USA is located just 73 miles from where we sit tonight. 11,000 of our fellow Alabamians live in Wilcox County where the unemployment rate is chronically in double digits. Everyone in this room knows Alabama is one of the poorest
states in America, where 1 in 4 children live in poverty. Nearly 1 million of our fellow Alabamians are dependent on food stamps.

The statistics are sobering. The facts are indisputable. Never-ending cycles of a need for jobs, better job skills and
better education, plague our communities. We resolve to reverse the trends that have troubled our state for decades.

We will never see an end to the plague of poverty by offering a deeper dependence on a flawed government system. We will never help our
poorest citizens, or our future generations, by casting over them the net of federal government giveaway programs. We can break the cycle of poverty, but not with programs that drag our communities and our people into the downward spiral of dependence.

Source: 2014 State of the State Address to Alabama legislature
Jan 14, 2014